DC Year in Review: Democracy in America

We at DC have considered a number of political cultural controversies over the last months concerning: a new political correctness, domestic workers’ rights, celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving, the Tea Party, the problems of a Jewish and democratic state, identity politics, fictoids and other media innovations, the elections, the lost challenging conservative intellectuals, political paranoia in the U.S. and beyond, Park 51 or the Ground Zero Mosque, Healthcare Reform, and the continuing but changing problems of race and democracy in America, among others.

In just about all these controversies, there has been a basic split between two different visions concerning democracy and diversity, and more specifically two different visions of America.  One sign that democracy in America is alive and well despite all its problems, is that the past Presidential campaign was a contest between these two visions, clearly presented by the Democratic candidate for President and the Republican candidate for Vice President, and the citizenry made a choice.  Recalling how Obama and Palin depicted the two visions is an appropriate way to end the old and look forward to the New Year.

In Palin’s Speech at the Republican National Convention, she introduced herself and what she stands for:

“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,” [quoting Westbrook Pegler]

“I grew up with those people. They’re the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.

I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town. I was just your average hockey mom and signed up for the PTA.

I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.

So I signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids’ public education even better. And when I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and I knew their families, too.

Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska…… I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involved.

I guess — I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”(link)

Obama presents a clear alternative.  His vision and identity have been extensively rendered, in many of his speeches and in his two books.  He cut to the core in his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park on Election Day, 2008.  He stood there as the first African American elected President of the United States, and declared:

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled — Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of red states and blue states; we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.” (link)

As he opened the celebration of his victory, Obama summarized what he thought his victory means for the American story and American identity.  The contrast with Palin’s presentation could not be more striking.

Palin celebrated the traditional values and the homogeneity of small town America.  She tapped into a nostalgia for a rural American myth, building her speech around the words of Westbrook Pegler, an American racist of the mid – twentieth century.  She returned to this theme during the campaign itself.  In a speech she gave in Greensboro, North Carolina, she declared:

“We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America,” Ms. Palin said, according to a pool report. “Being here with all of you hard-working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation. This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans.”(link)

Although it is not stated, this real America is homogeneous.  It is not black, not foreign born, not the children of the foreign born, not gay, not Muslim, probably not Jewish.

Obama is clearly from the point of view of that world an outsider. He has not looked at the past with nostalgia.  Rather, he has searched the past for the future promise of inclusion.  The American people of all races and creeds chose him to be their leader.  This is a sea change, measured by its distance from the Palin ideal.

America is the place that is open, where a man of African and Muslim, as well as Christian and agnostic, ancestry became the leader of the country.  That this could and did happen re-defines what the nation is.  Much of the controversies during his Presidency involve an adamant rejection of this re-definition.